Industry Collaboration and Academic Research

Researchers benefit from a reasonable level of collaboration with industry, not only bringing economic benefit to their institutions, but also increased publication levels.

That's according to findings presented by City University London economists at the Royal Economic Society conference in May. Cornelia Meissner outlined how she and her colleagues analysed the publications, research funds and patents of researchers in the engineering departments of Imperial College London and City University London between 1985 and 2006, and concluded that:

Researchers with no industrial involvement are likely to be those with the least research outcome ... Nevertheless, high levels of industrial involvement affect negatively research productivity in terms of number of publications.

The authors recommend that universities should, through Technology Transfer and Knowledge programmes, encourage collaboration with industry, while continuing to provide incentives to encourage publishing.

See the full report here.

Meanwhile, at the Times Higher Education’s Employer Engagement conference in May, David Sweeney, director for research, enterprise and skills at the Higher Education Funding Council for England, argued that the pursuit of IP distracts from other areas of engagement with business which could potentially bring more income. HEFCE's policy, said Sweeney, will be to focus on what he termed 'shared investment' workforce development schemes, where taxpayers and employers share the cost of upskilling workforces through collaboration and exchange of expertise with higher education institutions.

For Hannah Fearn's report on a conference which involved much heated debate, see here.